The last thing on your mind when you register a domain and start building a new website is your website’s DNS. When you rely on your registrar’s DNS service, you are relying on a company that doesn’t necessarily specialize in managed DNS. This means you run the risk of your site going down or being slow. When that does happen, if their support team isn’t knowledgable about the DNS service, you may have a hard time getting it fixed. As they say, what is free isn’t always good, and it is important to understand all the risks you take when using your registrar’s DNS.
Check out the top 5 reasons not to use your registrar’s DNS below.
1. Reliability
Your main goal with your website is to have it be reliable, meaning always available when you or your customers would like to visit it. With over 100 points of presence located across the globe in distinct geographic locations, when your websites DNS is with No-IP, your website is protected from unnecessary downtime. Since our founding in 1999, we have guaranteed a 100% uptime for our service and delivered.
2. Speed
DNS helps your website speed. Anycast DNS helps your website load quickly. No-IP’s Anycast network has over 100 points of presence across the globe. What does that mean? It means that when your customer is trying to connect to your site it will ping to whatever DNS server is closest to them, making sure it has the fastest speed possible. If they are connecting from San Diego, it will ping off our Los Angeles site. In Japan? It will ping our server in Tokyo. This guarantees that your site loads fast, no matter where your customers are.
3. Redundancy
Many domain registrars only host their DNS on one or two servers, oftentimes in the same place. This means if something bad happens, like a power outage or natural disaster, your website can go down completely. It may even be down for an extended period of time. This is because they don’t understand the importance of DNS redundancy. During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, two of our DNS servers were affected by the storm. However, no websites or DNS services were affected because of our redundancy due to our Anycast Network. When one of our servers goes down, all the information from that server is rerouted to one of the 100 other POPs No-IP has.
4. Features
Basic free DNS offered by a domain registrar typically lacks advanced DNS features. What you see is what you get and there is no ability to customize the DNS to your website’s wants and needs. If your site goes down does your domain registrar give your an offline option or the ability to redirect to a different IP address? Probably not, but No-IP’s Plus Managed DNS does. Plus Managed DNS gives a host of features, including Port 80 redirections, TXT Record and SPF Support, the ability to support 5 MX records, and much more.
5. Support
When a company doesn’t specialize in a DNS service, its support team may not be as knowledgable about that service. This means when you have an issue with your DNS, they may not be able to fix the problem, or even help you at all. In fact, many large registrars outsource their support to various countries, making it that much harder to get help when you need it. When dealing with something as technical as DNS, good support is necessary.
At No-IP, we never outsource our support and make sure they are given the best training possible. Each of our support techs is knowledgable about not only DNS but Domain Registration as well, they can walk you through the steps to fix your DNS or even fix it for you. NO support ticket goes unanswered, which is why we have some of the best support in the industry.
Despite the fact that many registrars have had serious outages and significant downtime as a result, companies still make the mistake of choosing them for their DNS services. Not only do these outages cost them time, but they also cost money as well. It is an easy thing to avoid as many DNS providers offer a managed DNS service that is cost-effective and easy to use.